About campaign drafts and experiments

Drafts and experiments let you propose and test changes to your Search and Display Network campaigns. You can use drafts to prepare multiple changes to a campaign. From there, you can either apply your draft’s changes back to the original campaign or use your draft to create an experiment. Experiments help you measure your results to understand the impact of your changes before you apply them to a campaign.

This article explains how campaign drafts and experiments work, and how they can benefit your advertising strategy.

Example

Anthony helps run advertising for his company, and his boss asks him to design a revised strategy for their search ads. Anthony creates a draft from an existing campaign and is able to show his boss exactly how the campaign would change. He receives approval and applies the draft back to the original campaign.

Next quarter, Anthony and his boss consider changing bids for their campaign but want to be confident these changes will improve performance. Anthony creates a draft with the bid changes and runs a month-long experiment. Results at the end of the month show that changing bids improved performance, so he applies his experiment to the original campaign.

How campaign drafts work

Drafts let you prepare multiple changes to a campaign without impacting its performance. When you create a draft, you’re mirroring your campaign’s setup. From there, you can make updates to your draft just as you would in a normal campaign. At any point, you can leave and return to your draft to make additional changes to it, or discard the draft altogether.

After you’ve finished drafting your changes, you can apply your draft to the original campaign or create an experiment to test how your changes perform against your original campaign.

How campaign experiments work

After you’ve finished a draft, instead of applying your changes to your original campaign, you can convert your draft to an experiment. Note that while you can have multiple drafts for a given campaign, only one of those drafts can run as an experiment at a time. As you set up your experiment, you can specify how long you’d like it to run and how much of your original campaign’s traffic (and budget) you’d like it to use.

When a potential customer performs a search on Google or a search partner website, or loads a webpage on the Display Network, either your original campaign or your experiment is randomly made active for the auction, depending on how you’ve split the traffic share between your campaign and your experiment.

As your experiment runs, you can monitor and compare its performance against your original campaign. If you’d like, you can change the dates of your experiment to end it early. If your experiment performs better than your original campaign, you may consider applying your experiment to the original campaign. You also have the option of converting your experiment into a new campaign with the same dates and budget as your original campaign and pausing your original campaign.

Keep in mind

Drafts and experiments are only available for Search and Display Network campaigns. You won’t be able to create a draft or experiment for Video, App or Shopping campaigns.

Features and reports that aren't available for drafts

Ad schedule report

Category & Search terms

Auction Insights

Display Placements report

Scheduled email reports

Bid landscapes

Ad customizers that use "Target campaign" or "Target ad group"

Keyword diagnosis

Some automated bid strategies:

Target search page location

Target outranking share

Features that aren’t supported by experiments

Experiments generally support the same features as campaigns, with a few exceptions: